Daly: A Declaration of Independence for everyone
On July Fourth, many Americans get a warm glow from the famous assertion by Thomas Jefferson that “all men are created equal.” And rightly so — in the setting of British society in 1776, Jefferson was proposing a radical new political theory. But stopping there obscures how much work remains to be done. The works of three of the country’s finest writers — Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass — make that clear. They challenged Americans to rise above the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia.
All three writers were successors to the country’s founding generation. All three were journalists. All three helped formulate a sweeping new agenda for social justice — one that remains unfulfilled as we again celebrate America’s independence.
The American Revolution was a rights revolution proclaiming the end of the monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. The result (for propertied white males at least) would be a society whose upper ranks would be relatively broad and much less steep than the upper ranks of British society. But after the war, inequality persisted. Indentured servitude was widespread. Women and girls were still treated as appurtenances of males. And the population of enslaved people under chattel slavery remained subject to routine brutality.
In the next generation, between 1845 and 1855, a trio of activist journalists demanded nothing less than an end to sexism, homophobia and racism. They raised their voices to promote the idea that each individual matters, and that each individual has an equal right to self-determination. Fuller, Douglass and Whitman took republican democracy as a starting point and envisioned a “leveling up” from the bottom of society — no more enslaved people, no more second-class citizens. All are not identical, but all are equal in worth and dignity.
Margaret Fuller tackled the issue of sexism. She understood from experience that a paradox defined the status of most women. They were supposed to live up to two conflicting ideals. On the one hand, women, especially middle- and upper-class white Christian women, were considered delicate flowers who needed to be sheltered from the filth and strife of activities like business, the military and politics. As mothers, they were expected to center the home, where they would provide moral uplift and basic education to a large number of children. Any education they received was for the express purpose of raising educated sons and daughters to follow in their likeness.
At the same time, women — especially enslaved women and working-class and poor women, many of whom were not white — were considered beasts of burden who should cook, clean, wash, nurse and meet the needs of others all day and night. They alternately were seen by men as sturdy, dirty and flirty, whose bodies were not deemed worthy of protection from harm or assault. These women were not considered worthy of education like their supposedly more chaste, white maternal counterparts.
In her book “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Fuller challenged these assumptions. She argued that men and women were not polar opposites, and one sex was not superior to the other. Instead she argued that men and women were complementary and that the elements of the gender extremes were usually present in everyone, to varying degrees. Thus, she continued, most men were “womanly” to some extent, and most women were “manly” to some extent.
In other words, everyone was a mixed case of attributes. Since the sexes were not fixed at opposite poles, there was no basis for saying that one sex was suited only for certain activities — and therefore no basis for denying members of either sex the opportunity to find out what they were good at. Given a chance, women could do anything. As Fuller wrote, “Let them be sea-captains if they like!”
In his own way, Walt Whitman tacked the issue of homophobia. Scholars know that Whitman loved men. But almost every other aspect of Whitman’s sexual life is shrouded in mystery, red herrings, misconceptions, hints and rumors, claims and counterclaims, along with outright fabrications. Why? Because for Whitman, in matters of love and sex, the stakes were very high — both for his actions and for his words. During Whitman’s lifetime, sodomy laws — and how they were interpreted — made it illegal in New York state for a man to have sex with another man. Moreover, as Whitman well knew, a sizable portion of the population considered sexual acts between men immoral and repugnant.
By his own accounts, though, Whitman knew quite a few men intimately during his years as a journalist in Brooklyn. In his debut edition of “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, Whitman downplayed the homoerotic elements of his life and poetry. But his poetic masterpiece was quite daring about sex. He not only praised sexuality in general but also hailed the bodies (and body parts) of men and women. He also left behind flags and emblems telling readers that he was not only heterosexual. He was also what today we would label as homosexual, pansexual and perhaps even beyond-sexual.
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